The third goal of Zen practice, helping others achieve enlightenment, suggests that teachers should help students learn about their own composing practices and histories as part of their instruction, but they cannot help others until they learn to help themselves by reflecting on their own processes and histories, becoming enlightened, and…

Almost all of the author's community college students feel self-conscious about their vocabulary. She thinks that their resistance to expanding their vocabulary has many tangled roots: sometimes the students seem nervous about what they leave behind as they notch their vocabulary up to a more formal, college level. This article discusses how the…

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…

Each semester the author asks her first-year composition students to write a profile essay. The assignment, based on one in "St Martin's Guide to Writing," requires that students develop a thesis ("dominant impression" or "angle") about a place that they visit. The author is convinced that this essay is one of the most valuable and challenging…

In this article, the authors discuss what works for them in their first-year composition classes. In order to promote critical thinking and goal setting within her developmental writing and first-year composition classes, Susan Plachta begins their first class session by completing the standard introductions and syllabus discussions and finishes…

This article describes a pilot study that suggests writing-faculty workload may affect the pedagogical focus and rhetorical effectiveness of written response to students' essays. To study the relationship between writing-faculty workload and comments that faculty write on students' essays, the author sent an eleven-question survey to 30 English…

The standard organizational features of an essay (title, introduction, main body, and conclusion), together with their specific functions, constitute an established but neglected convention that enables students to write conventional essays and to appreciate the uses of variation in essay form. (HOD)

The purpose of this paper is to present a detailed analysis of the style of exemplary first-year writing in order to establish and understand those features of written discourse that first-year writing teachers most value and reward. Having established the stylistic features of exemplary first-year writing, the paper goes on to provide first-year…

Maintains that the five-paragraph essay formula confuses and alienates students and undermines the basic goals of writing instruction. Advocates developing a repertoire of alternatives for teaching form. Suggests that using the metaphor of the essay as journey is one such teaching alternative. (SR)