While reading a series of undergraduate essay drafts, ten newly appointed graduate teaching assistants consistently projected their own anxieties about academic writing onto the authors of the papers, with two exceptions: the students were imagined neither to have the teachers' compositional agency nor to feel their ambivalence about the academic…

Describes a technique for teaching the research paper in the college composition course. (DD)

Describes how college freshmen enjoy and benefit from writing short mystery stories. (DD)

Presents a "Text Act" theory and model of the linguistic rules whereby writers produce and construe meaning, and suggests ways it can help students in writing themes. (DD)

Reviews briefly the state of library instruction in today's academic libraries. Discusses three approaches to teaching library skills at the freshman level and details the author's experiences in working with a freshman composition course. (HTH)

This article offers a critical perspective on the default mode of freshman composition instruction, that is, its traditionally middle-class and white racial orientation. Although middle-classness and whiteness have been topics of critical interest among compositionists in recent years, perhaps the most effective challenge to this hegemony in…

The revision of written work should be thought of by students as a creative process, just as the editing of a film is a creative process. (JH)

Writing "lie" papers helped students develop both critical and writing abilities. (JH)

Linguistic behavior should be thought of as action-in-life rather than as expression of prior mental activity. (JH)

Asking students to describe an unrecognizable portion of an artifact sharpened their powers of observation.

Knowledge about language is, for most students, a necessary prerequisite to effective use of language. (JH)

Several ways of using films to generate student papers are discussed. (JH)